Fundamental Pedagogy Jana Doležalová
Pedagogy as Remedy for Human Things: Comenius at
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15.3 Pedagogy as Remedy for Human Things: Comenius at
the Turning of Epochs Jan Amos Komenský, or Comenius, is, without question, one of the leading figures and heirs of Czech Reformation and Czech pedagogy. His pedagogical project is a specific mix of Renaissance and Reformation influences. Like the Renaissance, Comenius tries to find an efficient method of enquiry and a didactic method ‘how to teach anything to anybody’. Like the Reformation, he wants to return to original roots, to a purely Biblical teaching. The truth of the Scripture must be accessible to every person without the intermediary of the (Catholic) Church’s magisterium – the authority that lies down and controls didactic dogma and that, according to the Reformists, has either twisted or completely obscured the truth. Hence the Reformation’s motto sola scriptura – ‘nothing but the Scripture’. It expresses a conviction that the Bible is all that is required if we want to lead a good and pious life. All Church dogma, Papal and Marian cult, liturgical rules, etc. are but unnecessary and alien accretion. This is a key moment in the history of pedagogy as the new movement called for literacy for the masses – let every man (and according to Comenius every 121 woman) read for himself and develop an authentic relationship with God through Scripture. Comenius’s pedagogical reform project is a reaction to dark social, political and religious struggles of the time. When reading his works, we must always do so with a certain degree of caution in this respect. His writings are governed by completely different philosophical premises than those we are used to today. Any interpretation that disregards or ignores the contemporary conditions under which Comenius (or indeed any author) wrote his books is condemned from the start to misinterpretation and misunderstanding. We shall, therefore, start with a brief overview of Comenius’s philosophical and theological premises and points of reference, upon which his educational project is built. A fundamental component of Comenius’s system is the concept of ‘the natural’, a synergy of cosmology, anthropology and nature philosophy. As a theologian, he sees nature and the entire created world as ‘Creation’, i.e. the intentional and meaningful work of a Creator. As a philosopher, he investigates natural creation ‘ sub specie educationis’ – from a pedagogical perspective – in order to discover educational potential in nature. Right at the beginning of his Didactica, he states that ‘everything that is has a purpose.’ 1 In other words – the natural word is not a chance collection of things or sequence of events that happen without any meaning and pass from nowhere to nowhere, but rather a purposeful continuance of existences called to a meaning. Everything that is, is ‘in order to ...’, to quote R. Palouš (1992, p. 18). Everything exists for some purposes, in order to do something. Every object, every entity is characterised by its teleological properties. It has a goal that lies outside of itself. It exceeds itself, exists and transcends itself because it was intended and created to be and do so. In Comenius’s own words – nothing is ‘ samosvojné’, i.e. existing only for itself. And therein lays the pedagogical endowment of the created world. At the moment of birth, every person is enrolled in the school of the world, which naturally fosters his humanity. In Comenius’s worldview, man is in need of such pedagogy. Of all creation, man is the only being capable of making himself with final purpose of his own existence, of ‘existing only for himself’, thus disrupting and standing out of the created order, or the pan-harmony of creation a Comenius himself says in his later writings, because creation finds ‘ samosvojnost’ unnatural, unoriginal and 1 To give the full quote: ‘We also mean by ‘nature’ God’s all-encompassing providence or the stream God’s goodness that never ceases to act on everybody and everything: to endow every created thing with a purpose. The hallmark of God’s wisdom is that nothing was made in vain, without a goal and without the means needed to attain that goal. Everything that is, therefore, is for a purpose and in order to fulfil that purpose everything is provided with the tools and means necessary and even a certain instinct so that nothing is led to its particular goal against its will and aversion, but rather gently and pleasantly, following its own nature and inclination.’ Komenský, J. A.: Didaktika velká, Prague 1905, pp. 51-52. 122 disorderly. How does Comenius explain this anthropological anomaly? In the introduction to his Didactica Magna, he gives a rather detailed explanation of the state and causes of the human problem that he hopes to rectify through his didactics. He starts with the Biblical story where man is presented as ‘ Imago Dei’, a being created to enjoy an intimate relationship with God. Man’s nature should reflect God’s character, be a reflection of the greatest imaginable and possible Good. Due to the archetypal fall into sin, man lost his ‘ nexus hypostaticus’ – his deeply personal relationship with his Maker, a relationship with a preordained power that makes possible a crucially important transcendence. Man thus deformed and closed himself off. This deformation prevents him from fulfilling his fundamental human function. Comenius, therefore, has a complex view of humanity. Man carries both positive and negative potential. People’s humanity is not entirely right, but is not entirely lost either. Human character is not pre-given. Man is capable of both humanity and inhumanity. Being human is not a static condition; it is a vocation, in which each person should actively and consciously participate. It is clear (not only to Comenius) that man and mankind are not doing very well in this respect. That is why we need schools and education that would help man fulfil his fundamental function. Nature itself offers a wealth of didactic material. One just needs to be patient and carefully observe the natural world. For example, in one of his fundaments 2 , Comenius notes that nature ‘makes not jumps, but rather progresses forward gradually’ and uses birds as an example. When a fledgling is hatched ‘the mature bird never orders him to fly and find its own food straight away’, Comenius says and continues: ‘and when the youngster is finally covered with feathers, the parent does not push him off the nest but trains him in the art of flight slowly, first stretching the wings inside the nest, then rising and flapping the wings just above the nest, then they attempt flight in the close proximity of the nest, then they hop from branch to branch, from tree to tree, from hill to hill, until the parent is confident in entrusting his offspring to the open air.’ Comenius draws the following didactic principles from this analogy: I) The sum of all study should be precisely divided into classes to make sure that what is learnt first lays the path and lights the way for what comes next. II) Time should be carefully divided to make sure that a specific task is assigned to each year, month and day. III) Let this system of time and work be strictly followed; skip nothing and do not change the order. 2 Fundament No. VII in Didactica Magna. All subsequent quotes are from the same work. See Komenský, J. A.: Didaktika velká, Prague 1905, pp. 155-157. 123 Comenius gives similar deductions for all his principles in the Didactica, linked by the common theme of a syncretic unity of the didactic method and the a priori naturalness of the world, as expressed in his well-known motto ‘ omnia sponte fluant, absit violentia rebus’ 3 . In the words of modern pedagogy: nature offers analogies for all the natural laws of efficient education: The educational- ontological principle – why teach? The ordering principle of teaching material – what to teach? The timing principle – when to teach? The methodical principle – how to teach? Comenius gave the following structure to his central pedagogical work: In the Prologue, he discusses whether, in principle, man has the capacity to learn, touches upon pedagogical teleology and explains why contemporary schools are inadequate and why he wants to reform them. In the second, general section ( Didactica generalis), the core of the Didactica, Comenius sets forth 29 didactic fundaments divided into four chapters called: I) How to make study certain (to achieve certain results)? II) How to make study easy, pleasant? III) How to make study thorough (powerful)? IV) How to teach economically (quickly)? In the specific section of his book ( Didactica specialis), Comenius applies his didactic principles on the teaching of sciences, arts, languages, morals and piety, covering all the areas of study of his times. He also proposes a new system of school organisation, which to this date surprises by its level of technical detail and topicality. Most readers are probably familiar with his system but we give a brief summary here for the sake of completeness: I) Maternity school – children are to be brought up at home from birth to the age of six. The content of education at this level is outlined by Comenius in his parenting handbook Informatorium školy mateřské. II) General school – from 6 to 12 years of age, children attend a general school that should be in every town and village. Boys and girls go to school together. The curriculum includes reading, writing, counting, religion, general studies (nature and society), singing, and handiwork. Lessons take place during two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. III) Latin school – from 12 to 18 years of age. Comenius recommended that each town has a Latin school. The curriculum is based on the seven liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music), natural sciences, geography, history, mathematics and languages such as Latin and Greek. However, 3 ‘Let everything pass naturally (spontaneously), let any violence be forbidden.’ This motto prefaces the title page of Comenius’s supreme didactic work Opera didactica omnia. 124 Comenius also recommends the study of modern languages so that people are able to communicate with their neighbours. IV) Academy – from 18 to 24 years of age. Each country should have one. It is an institution of higher education teaching theology, law and medicine. Religious and philosophical education is also important. He uses the work Academy that at the time denoted a Protestant place of higher learning – all Universities being Catholic. In Pampeadia, a work from his later period included in his key book De rerum humanarum emendatione consultatio catholica, Comenius also adds the inspirational concept of a ‘school of old age’ and a ‘school of death’. Study at an advanced age is highly recommended because while we can die at any moment of our lives, we must die in old age, Comenius observes. This gives an old person the unique opportunity to meditate, reject all that is transitory and prepare for eternity. While Comenius concedes that death is ‘the most terrible of terrible things’, he who commands his life to the hands of God has nothing to fear. ‘You were not afraid to be born, why be afraid to die? In both cases, the decision is not in your hands but in the hands of God.’ Those who die in this spirit, die a good death. By far the most important lesson of the school of life is, according to Comenius, the art of ‘the good death’, i.e. dying in peace, forgiveness and grace, subjects that one must master if he wants to graduate to the “eternal academy’. Comenius was an excellent observer of nature and human nature. The imagery he uses is didactically precise, functional and timeless. With his poetically archaic expressions, he managed to perfectly and understandably define didactic rules, which were to be much later rediscovered and experimentally tested by modern pedagogical science. Modern pedagogical theoreticians especially appreciate Comenius’s insistence on a correlation between concepts and objects, i.e. on the role the senses play in understanding, which was a crucial breakthrough at Comenius’s time; adequate speed, time and phasing of lessons, taking into account individual factors, the age, abilities and prior experience of each student – again something previously unheard of; emphasis on the use of methods suitable for the subject matter; emphasis on practical utility of what is being taught – Comenius often described this principle using the word chrésis, i.e. the judicious use what one has learnt and its application for the betterment of the world as opposed to learning for learning’s sake; the democratic spirit of his pedagogical system that called for an education for everybody regarding of their social status or sex; emphasis on the systematic, integral and complex organisation of education. This is precisely why Comenius is considered the founder of pedagogy as a science because his didactic work essentially covers the entire conceptual programme of a systematic pedagogical science. What is also fascinating and inspiring for 125 current (modern and post-modern) readers of Comenius’s work is that all his timeless principles are deduces from an entirely pre-modern anthropology and cosmology. Modern commentators often leave aside Comenius’s philosophical and theological points of reference as outdated residues of his times (e.g. Popelová 1958, p. 143). However, philosophy and theology play a fundamental role in Comenius’s educational system and it is, therefore, impossible to ignore them without the risk of jeopardising the integrity of the thinker’s legacy. Many elements of Comenius’s metaphysics do indeed merit the epithet ‘naïve’ or ‘utopian’ and even ‘fantastic’. 4 It is equally true that his didactic principles – no matter how genius for his times – cannot compete with modern didactics with its immense wealth of empirical findings in the fields of psychology, biology, sociology, cybernetics, etc. However, what remains inspiring about Comenius’s work and what modern pedagogy lacks is his (overlooked) teleology of transcendence. The final end of all his methodical principles, precepts, rules and all his pedagogical efforts is not a mere efficient teaching system that prepares students for their future life – in modern parlance ‘for successful establishment in the job market’. His objective is the complete opposite: to educate students not to live only for themselves. This is educatio in the original sense of the word ‘to lead forth’, ‘to take out’ man from himself, from his preoccupation with himself, from his withdrawal from others and from the world. Comenius knows that one’s wellbeing cannot be attained without or at the expense of general wellbeing and declares this in his famous saying ‘we all stand in the same theatre of the world and whatever happens on the stage concerns us all’ 5 as well as in his favourite holistic and universalist prefix pan, which in his mature works he consistently uses with nearly all areas of human activity (pansophia, panglotia, panharmony, etc.). While Comenius’s didactic achievements are genius in and of themselves, they make sense only if they are employed to make many man truly human, i.e. in harmony with the Universe, the Creator and creation. A school guided by the natural constitution of an open and outwardly engaged Creation becomes a genuine ‘workshop of humanity and, thereby, a tool of the general remediation of all things human. Herein lays the greatest contribution of Comenius’s pedagogical work. 4 Cf. Comenius’s numeric speculations (almost all cosmological principles appear to him triads) or pansophist mosaic. For more on this topic, see Hábl, J. Lekce z lidskosti v životě a díle J. A. Komenského. Praha: Návrat 2011. 5 A paraphrase from Unum necessarium: “We all sit in the great theatre of the world: everything that happens here concerns us all.” Czech translation from Molnár, A., Rejchrtová, 1987, p. 294. 126 Yüklə Dostları ilə paylaş:
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